Parents who shout at their children or call them “stupid” are leaving their offspring at greater risk of self-harm, drug use and ending up in jail, new research claims.
Talking harshly to children should be recognised as a form of abuse because of the huge damage it does, experts say.
The authors of a new study into such behaviour say “adult-to-child perpetration of verbal abuse … is characterised by shouting, yelling, denigrating the child, and verbal threats”.
“These types of adult actions can be as damaging to a child’s development as other currently recognised and forensically established subtypes of mistreatment such as childhood physical and sexual abuse,” the academics say in their paper in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.
This is correlation study, and we all know what that means, right? Correlations are significant results certainly, but not at all conclusive.
This is psychology/sociology, not MINT. If you start to question whether childhood experience is a valid causal vector to influence adult behaviour you should become a philosopher while the rest of the world happily assumes causation.
Also if you had actually glanced at the study you’d have seen that it’s a systematic review. Skimming over it what it’s saying is “there’s a ton of unorganised data out there that nonetheless shows a clear and distinct pattern we should study the topic for its own sake”.